In the past few weeks, a wave of new developments has flushed the so-called “Climategate” scandal out to sea. Perhaps the scary news coming out of Russia today will help keep the flotsam and jetsam of S.S. Climategate from surging back ashore any time soon.
Last week brought a spate of sobering climatic developments. First came news that the population of phytoplankton in the world’s oceans is plunging. Next came a new climate assessment report showing yet again that global warming is undeniable. Meanwhile, the world was broiling under record-breaking temperatures (and another account here) — most especially Russia, where the hottest temperatures ever recorded have dried up peatlands and forests, setting off fires that burned down entire villages and killed dozens of people.
Today, the news got even worse. Much worse.
A significant portion of the Russian wheat crop is now considered to be in jeopardy, causing the most dramatic rise in wheat prices in more than 50 years, according to the Wall Street Journal. The specter of wheat shortages in the months to come is now stalking the markets.
From another story in the Journal online today:
CHICAGO (Dow Jones)--The worsening drought in Russia has set wheat prices on fire.
Wheat futures surged past $7 a bushel on Monday, taking the grain 67% above June’s nine-month low.
The fields of Russia’s traditionally fertile Volga River region are strewn with withered wheat stalks. The heat and lack of rain have killed half of the crops in the worst-hit areas, while the surviving crops are expected to yield half as much as in previous years.
According to other reports, the drought and heat have decimated the wheat crop in a belt stretching all the way from Romania to Siberia.
And now there are fears that next year’s crop is at risk too. The winter wheat sowing season in that part of the world begins at the end of August. But right now, the soil is bone dry, so without rain soon, farmers won’t be able to sow their seed.
Meanwhile, analysts are predicting that Western Australia’s grain crop could drop to 9.5 million metric tons, compared to 14.5 million tons for a typical large crop from the region.
It is absolutely true that heat and drought are normal, recurrent parts of the global climate system. It’s also true that by definition, a climatic trend consist of changes that take place over decades, not simply years — let alone months. But it is also true that the decadal trend of climate is simply undeniable: each of the past few decades has been warmer than the one before it. The Russian heat wave and drought, as well as yet another year of record-breaking global average temperatures, should be seen in this context. They are almost certainly manifestations of the long-term climatic trend.
Thirty-five years ago this coming Sunday, Wally Broecker of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, predicted this trend. On August 8, 1975 he published a paper in Science predicting global warming from rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. It was, evidently, the first use of the term “global warming” in the scientific literature, according to Stefan Rahmstorf, writing in RealClimate. The headline for his piece is “Happy 35th Birthday, Global Warming!”
Except there’s not much to celebrate right now.
This thing has 4 Comments
Sorry to dissent but, one word — orthogonality.
If it’s not unprecendented it’s not us, and it’s not unprecedented. Gavin Schmidt has admited the non-dendro chronologies for the “Hockey Stick” aren’t valid prior to 1500. This means that we’ll just have to go with non-revisionist paleoclimate… when the MWP (or even 1938) was “as warm or warmer” than today.
http://climateaudit.org/2010/08/01/the-no-dendro-illusion/#more-11632
the heat wave is also not global… google “cold death south america”
http://www.accuweather.com/blogs/news/story/34265/south_america_cold_wave_brings.asp
If it’s not unprecedented it’s not us? Who says? And why do you choose to ignore physics? I think it’s because of politics, not science.
Models with unvalidated parametric boundary conditions and feedbacks aren’t physics. I’d love to see what the GCM’s look like with negative feedback models as that would reflect the physics observed by ERBE (Lindzen and Choi).
If you want to talk politics, ask Dr. Pielke Sr. about NSF funding for non-alarmist, non-GHG centric climate science.
Russia’s seeming about face on climate change is very big news.
Like conservatives in the US, Russia has long mocked the idea of global warming. Their leadership described it as a western plot to slow Russias development.
In 2003, Vladimir Putin joked that a little extra heat would help Russians “save on fur coats and other warm things.”
Last winter Medvedev called the global-warming debate “some kind of tricky campaign made up by some commercial structures to promote their business projects.”
Medvedev announced that Russia would be spewing 30% more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere by 2020. “We will not cut our development potential,” he said during the summer of 2009.
Suddenly, with Russia on fire, cites darkened and polluted by smoke, the hottest temperatures on record, no rainfall and wheat crops failure across the country the same man who once mocked Global warming has become a convert.
At a meeting of international sporting officials in Moscow 6 days ago, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev announced that in 14 regions of the country, “practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot.” Then, as TV cameras zoomed in on the perspiration shining on his forehead, Medvedev announced, “What’s happening with the planet’s climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate.”
Climate change skeptics are starting to sweat too. To lose a big supporter like Russia is not good news